The Apple Trees at Olema (19 page)

Odd how families

live in houses. At first a lot marked out with string.

Then levels, rooms, that lift it off the ground,

arrange it, and then inside that intricate dance

of need and habit and routine. Children's crayon drawings

on the wall. Messages on the refrigerator. Or altars

for the household gods. At night the dreaming bodies,

little gene pool echoes passing back and forth among them,

earlobe, the lap of an eyelid, and the dreams.

Under sorrow, what? I'd think. Under

the animal sense of loss?

Climbing in Korea,

months later, coming to the cave of the Sokkaram Buddha—

a view down a forested ravine to the Sea of Japan—

perhaps a glimpse: the closed eyelids—you'd have to make a gesture

with your hand to get the fineness of the gesture in the stone—

the stone hands resting on the thighs, open, utterly composed.

Cool inside. Dark. The stone, though there was no lighting,

seemed to glow. It seemed I could leave every internal fury there

and walk away. In the calm I felt like a wind-up monkey.

Like I had always been a wind-up monkey, and that,

if I knew the gesture (going outside? picking the petals

of the wildflowers—there was something like a thimbleberry bush—

everything was “like” something I knew—on the path

from the monastery—so I seemed to be walking

in a parallel universe, peopled

by unfamiliar birdsong,

and ancient trail dust, and the forest's dappled light—

papery flowers, very plain ancestor of the garden rose—

another elaboration of desire—of a startling magenta-blue;

I thought I might pick them, bring them in,

and drop before the—what—the Buddha—

the carved, massive stone, the—)

Also thought I could leave my wedding ring. And didn't do it.

In the months we were apart, I had endless fantasies

about when I'd finally take it off and how. And then one day,

I was moving, lugging cardboard boxes, I looked down

and it wasn't there. I looked in the grass of the driveway strip.

Sow bugs, an earwig. So strange. This was a time when,

in the universities, everyone was reading Derrida.

Who'd set out to write a dissertation about time;

he read Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Augustine, and found

that there was no place to stand from which to talk about it.

There was no ground. It was language. The scandal

of nothingness! Put cheerfully to work by my colleagues

to dismantle regnant ideologies. It was a time when,

a few miles away, kids were starting to kill each other

in wars over turf for selling drugs, schizophrenics

with matted hair, dazed eyes, festering feet, always engaged

in some furious volleying inner dialogue they neglected,

unlike the rest of us, to hide, were beginning to fill the streets,

“de-institutionalized,” in someone 's idea of reform,

and I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house

inch by inch, looking under the car seat where the paper clips

and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once

vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages

where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there.

I never found it.

Looking at old frescoes

from the medieval churches in The Cloisters once, I wondered if,

all over Europe, there were not corresponding vacancies,

sheer blanks where pietàs and martyrdoms of Santa Lucia

and crowing cocks rising to announce the dawn in which

St. Peter had betrayed his lord in sandstone and basalt

and carnelian marble once had been. This emptiness

felt like that. Under the hosannahs and the terror of the plague

and the crowning of the Virgin in the spring.

I didn't leave my ring. Apparently I was supposed to wait

until it disappeared. I didn't know what else, exactly,

I could leave.

In Seoul, in Myongdong, in a teeming alley,

there was a restaurant where the fish was so fresh

they let you know it by beginning each meal

with a small serving of the tips of the tentacles

of octopus, just cut, writhing on a plate.

In the latticed entrance, perch glowing like pearls

in the lamplight thrown from doorways

as they circulate, wide-eyed and moony, in the tanks,

coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters,

squid like the looseness in a dream. Had been at a meeting

all day on the conditions of imprisoned writers.

This one without paper and pen for several years.

This one with blood in his urine.

In small cells

all over the world, I found myself thinking,

walking through the marketplace—apple-pears

and nectarines in great piles, wavery under swinging lamps,

as if you could sell the sunrise—torturers upholding

the order of the state. Under screams order, and under that—

it must be the torturer's nightmare—nothing.

Smoothness

of the stone at Sokkaram. The way the contours, flowing,

were weightless and massive at once. I said to myself

there was kindness in the Buddha's hands, but there wasn't kindness

in the hands. They made the idea of kindness

seem—not a delusion exactly, or a joke. They smoothed

the idea away the way you'd stroke a nervous or a frightened dog.

(Outside again. Rubbing my eyes. Deep night, brilliant stars.

I never thought I'd write about this subject. Was tired of “subjects.”

Mallarmé on music: the great thing is that it can resolve an argument

without ever stating the terms. But thought I'd ride this rhythm out,

this somewhat tired, subdued voice—like Landor's “Carlino,” perhaps—

a poet-guide!—and see where it was going.)

Around that time—

find the neutral distance in which to say this—

a woman came into my life. What I felt was delight.

When she came into the room, I smiled. The gift was

that there didn't need to be passionate yearning across distances.

One night—before or after Sokkaram?—when we had made love

and made love, desperate kissings, wells of laughter,

in a monkish apartment on the wooden floor, we went outside,

naked in the middle of the night. There must have been a full moon.

There was a thick old shadowy deodar cedar by my door

and the cones were glowing, lustrously glowing,

and we thought, both of us, our happiness had lit the tree up.

The word that occurs to me is
droll
. It seemed sublimely droll.

The way we were as free as children playing hide-and-seek.

Her talk—raffish, funny, unexpected, sometimes wise, darkened—

the way a black thing is scintillant in light—by irony.

The way neither of us needed to hold back, think

before we spoke, lie, tiptoe carefully around a given subject,

or brace ourselves to say hard truths. It felt to me hilarious,

and hilarity, springwater gushing up from some muse's font

of crystal in old poems, seemed a form of emptiness. Look!

(Rilke in the sonnets) I last but a minute. I walk on nothing.

Coming and going I do this dance in air. At night

when we had got too tired to talk, were touching all along our bodies,

nodding off, I'd fall asleep smiling. Mornings—for how long—

I'd wake in pain. Physical pain, fluid; it moved

through my body like a grassfire spreading on a hill.

(Opposite of touching.) I'd think of my wife, her lover,

some moment in our children's lives, the gleam of old wood

on a Welsh cabinet we'd agonized over buying,

put against one wall, then another till it founds its place.

This—old word!—riding that we made, its customs, villages, demesnes,

would torture me awhile. If she were there, rare mornings

that she was—we did a lot of car keys, hurried dressing, last kisses

on swollen lips at 2 am—I'd turn to her, stare at her sleeping face

and want to laugh from happiness. I'd even think: ten years

from now we could be screaming at each other in a kitchen,

and want to laugh. My legs and chest still felt as if

someone had been beating them with sticks. I could hardly move.

I'd quote Vallejo to myself: “
Golpes como del odio de Dios”
;

I'd stare at the ceiling, bewildered, and feel a grief

so old it could have been some beggar woman in a fairy tale.

I didn't know you could lie down in such swift, opposing currents.

Also, two emptinesses, I suppose, the one

joy comes from, the one regret, disfigured intention, the longing

to be safe or whole flows into when it's disappearing.

I'd gone out of the cave. Looked at the scaled brightness

of the sea ten miles away; looked at unfamiliar plants.

During the war, a botanist in Pusan had told me,

a number of native species had become extinct. People

in the countryside boiled anything that grew to make a soup.

We had “spring hunger,” he said, like medieval peasants.

There's even a word for it in ancient Korean. Back inside,

in the cool darkness carved with boddhisattvas,

I presented myself once more for some revelation.

Nothing. Great calm, flowing stone. No sorrow, no not-sorrow.

Lotuses, carved in the pediment, simple, fleshy, open.

Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away,

but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.

Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.

Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,

and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash

and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.

Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.

If you're lucky, you're hungry.

In the town center

of Kwangju, there was a late October market fair.

Some guy was barbecuing halfs of baby chicks on a long, sooty contraption

of a grill, slathering them with soy sauce. Baby chicks.

Corn pancakes stuffed with leeks and garlic. Some milky,

violent, sweet Korean barley wine or beer. Families strolling.

Booths hawking calculators, sox, dolls to ward off evil,

and computer games. Everywhere, of course, it was Korea,

people arguing politics, red-faced, women serving men.

I thought in this flesh-and-charcoal-scented heavy air

of the Buddha in his cave. Tired as if from making love

or writing through the night. Was I going to eat a baby chick?

Two pancakes. A clay mug of the beer. Sat down

under an umbrella and looked to see, among the diners

feasting, quarreling about their riven country,

if you were supposed to eat the bones. You were. I did.

First she was singing. Then it was a gold thing, her singing.

And her bending. She was singing and a gold thing.

A selving. It was a ringing before there was a bell.

Before there was a bell there was a bell. Notwithstanding.

Standing or sitting, sometimes at night or in the day,

when they worked, they hummed. And made their voices high

and made sounds. It was the ringing they hadn't heard yet

singing, though they heard it, ringing.

When Casamiro's daughter went to the river and picked arum leaves,

and wet them, and rubbed them together,

they made the one sweet note that was the ringing.

It was the one-note cry of a bee-eating bird

with a pale blue crest, and when the first one

made the ringing with the arum leaves, and the others

heard that the arum leaves were the bee-eating bird,

they laughed. Their laughter rang.

And the young guy who worked metal—they liked it best at night,

when the iron glowed and the sparks showered down

and he struck metal against metal in the glowing.

He fashioned what he fashioned for adornment

or for praying or for killing. And he knew the made things

from the ringing. Which was the arum leaves and the sounds

made in love and the bee-eating bird and the humming.

She sang like that, something of keening and something of laughing,

birth cries, and a gold thing, ringing.

In the saliva

In the paper

in the eclipse

In all the lines

in all the colors

in all the clay jars

in my breast

outside inside—

in the inkwell—in the difficulties of writing

in the wonder of my eyes—in the ultimate

limits of the sun (the sun has no limits) in

everything. To speak it all is imbecile, magnificent

DIEGO in my urine—DIEGO in my mouth—in my

heart. In my madness. In my dream—in

the blotter—in the point of my pen—

in the pencils—in the landscapes—in the

food—in the metal—in imagination

in the sicknesses—in the glass cupboards—

in his lapels—in his eyes—DIEGO—

in his mouth—DIEGO—in his lies.